How To: Create an Attribute for Dynamic Date Filtering in Digital.ai Intelligence

It's often useful to have dashboards and visualizations default to current or prior time periods (day, week, month, year, etc) without forcing the user to make those selections manually.

We can add "lagging" period attributes to the cubes, which produce values 0, 1, ... based on the time difference between the activity date and last extract date. Then, for example, you can filter on the attribute's value = 0, which gives you the current month, year, etc.

This doesn't always satisfy the use case because the out-of-the-box lagging period attributes are based on the generic calendar periods (aka canonical dates) and default activity types (open, resolved, etc). Sometimes, you need to filter on the current/prior period for a different activity date.

In this case, you can create a custom lagging attribute based on the particular date of choice. Here is an example using the Outage Start. You can then filter on the Outage Start Lagging Month = 0 for the current month, 1 for the prior month, etc.

The DiffUnit parameter can be changed for various time periods, and the possible parameter values can be found by selecting the "Details" link in the dialog box above.

These values can be used in a variety of filtering options. In the example below, we are using the new attribute to filter each visualization - one for the current month one for the prior month.